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Threadless's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
ART / VISUALS | #204 | 3.474 | 3.474 |
SOUNDS / MUSIC | #248 | 2.947 | 2.947 |
CONTROLS | #292 | 2.789 | 2.789 |
Overall | #308 | 2.816 | 2.816 |
BOSS DESIGN | #371 | 2.579 | 2.579 |
FUN | #387 | 2.579 | 2.579 |
USE OF THEME | #393 | 2.526 | 2.526 |
Ranked from 19 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Game's Take on the Theme
Since the main character is an automaton, the player must spin the character's crank to start the game and also to revert time when is defeated.
Did your team make the majority of the art and music during the jam?
Yes, all of it.
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Comments
Hey There!
I wanted to try and analyze every game in more detail, but unfortunately :( there's no time left for that, as there's only ONE hour left to vote, and there are still 200-300 games to go. So, my rating will be based on what I can see on the profile page (graphics, concept, description, etc.) to contribute a few points and help improve your chances! I'm not expecting a rating or anything in return since time runs out in an hour. It simply gives me peace of mind knowing that I was able to rate every game. :)
Wishing you all the best! ;)
Thanks! It's very nice of you to try to achieve such an ambitious goal. I hope the best for you ;)
Love the art style! really challenging game as well!
(If you're willing to I'd love it If you rate and give me some feedback on my game! I'd love to see where I can improve for the future! :D )
I really like the visuals, the animations are nice and smooth, also mechanics are nice, the Teakeeper is really strong but I like the design a lot, I rate graphics, controls and fun on top but all is cool, also, if you have some time, please, rate my game too, thanks!!!
Love the artstyle!
Very good game! Art is super cool.
The game is extremely unforgiving, but the difficulty is what hooked me up to try again and again to beat the first boss. (I wasn't brave enough to entirely finish the game unfortunatly)
I also really like the atmosphere of the game, great job !
When I read the intro I surely didn't imagine Threadless being such a cute little thing, so certainly a bit of whiplash going from that mood to little sheep.
I think having 1 HP was detrimental to your game, the bosses didn't have very interesting movesets or dialogue, and the story was very fake deep. It went through all the hoops and did all the tricks, but the routine is so standard I didn't feel I could see you as an author behind it. What are your inspirations? (was it nier automata) Your choice of words and prose/poetry are well-presented, but pretty hollow.
"A soft song, its sound feels like velvet amidst poignant nothingness. A sweet whisper of pneuma that flows inside you."
You crank up that lever to activate her, but the activity of spinning doesn't evoke such a kind, mellow awakening, like her blood is finally flowing through her veins anymore. Hard to imagine a wind-up doll is moving through liquid, not cogs, so the song her reactivation echoes ought to be more jagged than soft. A sound whose touch is akin to fabric in a sad empty space. You carried it all over the place and there's no image to make, just "difficult" words to nod and go "wow so deep i dont get it," but it's more like it doesn't construct anything, so there isn't anything quite to get. I could force a meaning into it just to say there is one, but it's because I forced this peg into a hole that it isnt shaped like. I think it is an important moment, and a precious thing to try to convey, how does a doll feel when it is winded-up, but adlibbing it with loaded words and calling it a day isn't the dream approach.
Hi, Bashidan! Thank you for making a much more thorough review regarding the story, even if it's more focused on the introduction. I appreciate the insight!
I understand that my writing style may come off as a bit pedantic, but that's not really my intention. It's just how I've been taught to write in my time as a literature student. Still, I do think it's something I should try to fix in future writings, so its good to get called out on that. If you have any recommendations I'm more than happy to read them!
I appreciate the comment on "pretty words don't equal depthness" (and I agree!), but what I was trying to convey certainly wasn't what you rephrased. Rather than simplifying the metonyms as adjectives, the "image" should be transformed into experience. It's not just the synesthesia, it's the symbolic nature of the words! I hope you can give it another opportunity, though, as I would really appreciate a critique on some of my other writings. Also, there was supposed to be more dialogues in the game (there were more conversations with bosses), but because of some errors you can't really read them in the final product :(, maybe that would've helped with come across the general idea of the story.
Thank you again for the comment!
PS: I did have NieR: Automata as one of my inspirations, but, honestly, they were all over the place. I took some things from Land of The Lustrous (Haruko Ichikawa), The Incal (Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius), Void Stranger (SystemErasure), some Borges, Cortázar and Bolaño here and there, and the general aesthetics of Bloodborne.
Then I'll go with how I interpreted it (what I called putting the peg in) and you tell me if I understood your writing intent. To be quite honest with you, I only don't like poignant nothingness, that's when it sounded to me you chose better words rather than adequate words. Either way, I understand the velvet to be the feeling of having a soul, and the poignant nothingness as the husk of the doll before the soul enters. The awareness of the melancholy of being inactive, being replaced, filled in, by the soul becoming active. The sound of the touch in the soft song also doesn't sit very well, despite understanding it, though a song of being alive to me is too organic a feeling to apply to a machine. Without changing your script, I'd consider melody rather than song, as that evokes the mechanical, the instrument, and hollow rather than nothingness. But I don't know what could go well with hollow instead of poignant.
I'd convey this emotion more like the birth of a baby, being enveloped by a blanket, so I think "the melody envelops the poignant hollow, the sweet touch of pneuma flowing, spreading, feeling, thinking, being" or something like this, to evoke the transmutation from "object" to "person" as the soul returns to it. Another approach I think would be fine would be detailing sensations, to represent the feelings returning to the automata. Instead of listing "touch" through velvet and "sound" through "song" and "whisper," you could start the description as cold and unfeeling, and as the pneuma spreads you start choosing words that evoke the touch/warmth, the sound, the light and such things.
I'll be looking forward to the day it comes out with the full dialogue set to analyze further the writing, then.
Between Lustruous and Borges I can see you're well fed in your readings, so I'm sure this was just a case of our qualias mismatching, rather than having nothing in common in our writing.
Oh, I understand what you mean now! Yeah, I used the archaic meaning of poignant (as stinky rather than sad). The song is meant to be the pneuma, while the feeling of nothingness, the absence of life, makes the doll feel uncomfortable. I do like melody though, I may change it to that and search a synonym of poignant. The progression from lack to the presence of sound also makes more sense, I'll add it later as well!
Again, thank you so much for the comment! I doubt we'll be able to add a lot more things to the game (we're already continuing with other projects), but I will make sure to upgrade the writing as best as I can for the update we have planned! I'll check out your game too and leave a comment :)
PS: You should try Void Stranger! I think you'd really like it.
Well, I hope this feedback can help with how you tackle your writing for your other games then!
And if it turns out one day you find out you'll really never come back to it, post the scripts that didn't make it as a blog post or something, I'd love to know the full picture of this world.
(That's the second time someone recommends it to me, I should really get it now)
Visuals are really nice. Player animations are simple but effective. It might be just be me, but I'm very curious as to how the game would feel if my movement didn't slow down when reloading? I'm not sure tho! I enjoyed your submission. The first boss was harder haha but I see you're already aware. The gun also felt nice to shoot.
Should i spin it in clockwise or counter clockwise :-) Nice game.
It works both ways
So where to begin, I liked the music of the game, I think it would be good to release a little ost track on youtube so we could listen to it outside the game. The visuals also were great I loved our little girl, I realized quick that the threads and our decision to use them had pretty significant consequences so I found that quite creative. It all fit into the narrative very well and the idea of threads, spinning brings into me like the idea of a loom, of weaving fate and with the multiple endings, I think this is genuinely a game I will replay later to see the other endings and see the other character's stories.
Ps. Some bosses can get pretty difficult, but I mainly felt it so because I ran out of dashes, so I could have timed it a bit better, but maybe having an extra one can keep that tension and pressure of the boss, without reducing his difficulty but making it easier on the player.
Aside that... you can also cheese the bosses, it seems they can be hit even without triggering their dialogue by going past the door, so we can shoot them and kill them slowly, after a certain point their second phase triggers and well they get moving but, yeah a simple bug fix.
Great work! Loved the game.
Hi, JackCrescent! Thank you SO MUCH for the comment c:.
I'm glad the story of the game felt good enough to be commented on, I'm honestly really honored. I'm sorry about the errors, they went over our head when we were testing the game deep in the night to get it out on time HAHAHAHA.
I bet, those errors tend to happen with the rush of everything, we had a few ourselves, Im just used to trying to break games and finding any exploits. But overall a good game, yall should be proud!
That was fun to try but I just couldn't beat the first boss... Like I don't play games like this much so I assume its the worst skill issue ever on my part. But from what I could play, its a solid well put together game with a theme that follows the spin idea in an extremely unique way!
Thanks for playing :) After uploading it, I realized that the first boss is actually the hardest, so don't feel bad about yourself, I could have balanced the difficulty better.
Honestly, fun experience, but the tea pot's health is a lot. I feel like after a set amount of resets the player should be given some pity but that's a personal thing and not objective. Aside from that I loved the sound design, the parry sound sounds a lot like ultrakill's coin which was nice to hear.
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! A help system for the player would have been great actually, we didn't have enough time for playtesting 😅